Written and Spoken English 1

The difference between written and spoken English
and the implications on Japan’s English instruction

Written and Spoken English 2

1. Introduction
In 2003, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science, andTechnology (MEXT) released the Course Study for Foreign Languages, which states as
its overall objective, to “develop students’ basic communication abilities such as
listening and speaking, deepening the understanding of language and culture, andfostering a positive attitude towards communication in foreign languages.” In otherwords, one of the key goals of the Japanese English curriculum is to develop oral
communication skills in English. The emphasis on oral communication in JapaneseEnglish education is apparent from the fact that all Japanese textbooks approved by
MEXT are dialogue based (Matsuda, 2002).
However, a problem with Japan’s English education is that it does notadequately distinguish between spoken and written language. One example is the story
of Yuko, a Japanese student who attended through high school in Japan, and thenattended college in the United States, who spoke English with hesitation and numerous
pauses during interviews, but often “in near-perfect English…she was formulatingcorrect phrasing” (Spack, 1997). In this paper, I examine a 2nd year English class at a
public junior high school from a returnee student’s perspective, and demonstrate that theso-called “oral communication” taught in class fails to adequately encompass the wider

Written and Spoken English 3

range of spoken English as compared to written English.
Before discussing English education in Japan as a form of bilingual education,bilingualism needs to be defined. Bilingualism is multi-dimensional, and is defined by
criteria such as competence, balance, and function of the two languages, (Edwards,
2004; Li, 2000). An intuitive measure of bilingualism is to determine a bilingual’s
proficiency in both languages, yet proficiency is difficult to estimate and even define,because there are even variations in competence among native speakers (Butler andHakuta, 2004). Bilingualism is further complicated because a bilingual is not simply
two monolinguals in one person, but rather one individual with multiple languages, whouses their languages for different functions (Grosjean, 1985). For example, Romaine(1995) explores code-switching as an effective means of communication between
bilinguals, and Pavlenko (2006) delineates how bilinguals have different personalities ineach of their multiple languages. Furthermore, bilinguals often live together in alinguistic community, which makes it necessary to explore the interaction of groups ofbilinguals within a society (Baker, 2006).
Second, what are the issues underlying bilingual education? Some major areas
are the role of first-language (L1) proficiency, the age of exposure to L2, and thedifferent outcomes of submersion and immersion education. A significant, yet often

Written and Spoken English 4

neglected theory is Cummins’ (1979) developmental interdependence hypothesis, whichstates that the level of competence attainable in L2 is a function of the competence in a
student’s L1 at the start of L2 education (Cummins, 1979; Dicker, 2003). Anothercritical issue is when to begin bilingual education. While younger learners often end up
with better pronunciation, older learners have significant cognitive advantages and often
learn at a faster pace (Dicker, 2003). In addition, there is often a wide gap between
bilingual education for majority and minority language students. As Skutnabb-Kangas(1995) points out, many minority language communities are forced to become bilingualfor education and employment opportunities. Especially for working class minority
language children, a sense of “subaltern subjectivity” results when students resist theimposition of a majority language, and yet do not have adequate resources to master the
language, as is the case in Hong Kong, where an English-speaking bilingual elite
dominate over the Chinese-speaking working class (Lin, 2005). In contrast, Genesee(2004) found that second language acquisition can usually be achieved with no negative
effects on first language for majority language students.
Finally, how are such theories implemented in bilingual education? Singapore
is often cited as a successful case of bilingual education, because it has achieved a highdegree of multilingualism through requiring “Mother Tongue” (Mandarin, Tamil, orWritten and Spoken English 5

Malay) and English education (Dixon, 2009). One of the factors of success for
Singapore’s language policy is the high prestige and economic value of English—in
many English speaking nations, such as Australia, the reverse effect means that English
speaking students often lack motivation to learn foreign languages (Smolicz & Secombe,2003). Looking at Japan, Kanno (2008) finds that submersion to Japanese is the main
goal for ethnic minority children, and that their potential as a source of linguistic capitalis ignored by the government and businesses. Returnees often have a similar experience;teachers often point at returnee weaknesses instead of strengths (Kanno, 2000). In
contrast, some middle class children at Nichiei Immersion School, a private K-12
school, take the partial English immersion program there in order to potentially join
Japan’s bilingual social elite (Kanno, 2008).

2. Methodology
I interviewed a 2nd year junior high school student, Tatsuya (a pseudonym),
about Ms. Tanaka’s (a pseudonym) 2nd year English class at a public junior high schoolin the Tokyo metropolitan area. I collected additional details from Tatsuya in several
informal follow-up interviews, in addition to his textbook, homework, workbooks,
handouts, and exams. Tatsuya is a returnee student who was born in the United StatesWritten and Spoken English 6

and attended public elementary school through the 5th grade. He then moved to Japan,
and has attended Japanese public school since the 6th grade. Tatsuya’s background as areturnee student from a monolingual English speaking country provides a different
perspective from a non-returnee student, because his English proficiency is above theEnglish course, making it possible to compare what he learned abroad, and what he isbeing taught in Japan. I have also used my background as a returnee student who
attended from pre-school through high school in the United States to look beyond
Tatsuya’s perspective.
Analysis of the typical class day took the form of an indirect event reading,similar to one conducted by Spolsky and Shohamy (1999), with the main focus oncomparing “oral communication” as taught in class with the actual oral communication
skills that Tatsuya learned from his American education and environment. While I haveattempted to objectively cover the class in my interview, the details of the class arelimited to the questions I asked, and the responses offered. In order to construct a better
picture of the class, I have also included Tatsuya’s textbook and other class materials in
my analysis, by having him explain how his textbook was used in class, and what atypical homework assignment was like. In addition, I have analyzed one of Tatsuya’s
midterm exams, because exams cover the key concepts of the course.

Written and Spoken English 7

3. Findings and Discussion
3.1 Homework
In Japanese education, yoshu, or going over the content that will be covered
next class is a common practice. In this sense, the “homework” given in Ms. Tanaka’s
English class is an introduction to the next class’s lesson, and it makes morechronological sense to explain the homework before the typical class day.
The typical homework assignment is for students to copy a page of theirEnglish textbook’s dialogue in a notebook on the left page, with key vocabulary in acolumn next to the dialogue, and to translate the dialogue into Japanese on the right
page. A typical passage per page in the textbook has around 50 to 100 words, with about
5 to 10 new vocabulary words. Students also recite the page 30 times, and fill in a Bingo
sheet for next class, by picking 5 words each from 5 rows, with each row containing a
selection of similar words, such as the days of the week (sample Bingo sheet inAppendix A). During the next class, the students will play Bingo at the beginning, and
Ms. Tanaka’s main lesson will be about the page in the textbook assigned forhomework.
3.2 A typical class day
English class is held three times a week, each for a 50 minute period. The

Written and Spoken English 8

typical class day begins with the English teacher, Ms. Tanaka exchanging a routine
dialogue with the students:
Teacher: Hello.
Class: Hello.
Teacher: How are you?
Class: I’m fine, thank you. And you?
Teacher: I’m fine, thank you.
After these greetings, Ms. Tanaka conducts Bingo by reading out words, and the gameends when 10 students have two Bingos. The Bingo game typically lasts a little less than
10 minutes.
Ms. Tanaka then covers a passage in the textbook, at the pace of one page perclass. This is the main lesson of each class. She first plays the text on CD, with a native
English speaker reading the passage in an American accent. Then she goes over the
pronunciation and meanings of the new vocabulary words with flash cards, and calls on
individual students to check their pronunciation and understanding of the words. For
example, she will ask, “What is the meaning of college?” or “How do you pronounce
daigaku (college) in English?” After this review of the homework, she reads the passage
through once, and then again broken up into each character’s lines (the passages are
typically dialogues between two people), and the class repeats after her. She then reads
one character’s lines, as the class reads the other character, and vice versa. Finally, she
explains the meaning of the dialogue in Japanese, along with any new forms ofWritten and Spoken English 9

grammar and phrases used in the dialogue. If there is time, students stand and are thengiven time to recite the passage three times at their own pace, after which they may sit
down.
The class ends when the bell rings, and there is another exchange of greetings
between Ms. Tanaka and the students.
Class: Goodbye, Ms. Tanaka.
Teacher: Goodbye, see you, that’s all for today.
3.3 The role of Assistant Language Teachers (ALT)
ALTs teach the lesson on Mondays, and conduct a similar lesson to the one
described above, with minor modifications depending on how well they speak Japanese.
Their main purpose is to help students develop good pronunciation. Ms. Tanaka is alsopresent, and when an ALT does not speak Japanese, Ms. Tanaka acts as a translator.
From April to December, Ms. Tanaka’s class had an ALT from the United States, thePhilippines, and Russia.
3.4 Exams
While unusual in Japan, Tatsuya’s middle school has two semesters in a school
year, from April to October, and October to March. Each semester has one midterm anda final exam. Under the assumption that the exam format doesn’t undergo majorchanges throughout the year, the second semester midterm roughly breaks down asWritten and Spoken English 10

follows,, with a total of 100 points possible:
Listening: 18 points (Question 1 and 2)
Speaking: 12 points (Question 4, 6, and 7)
Translation: 30 points (Question 3, 5, 9, and 11)
Reading Comprehension: 12 points (Question 13 and 14)
Writing and Grammar: 28 points (Question 8, 10, and 12)
The listening section involves answering questions about a passage played on a CD. The“Speaking” questions ask about pronunciation, or ask students to pick an appropriate
response to a short dialogue. All answers are paper based.

4. Discussion and Conclusion
At first glance, the class appears to emphasize oral communication. Students
spend far more time speaking and listening to English than the stereotypical image of aJapanese English class of the instructor writing a sentence on the whiteboard, andanalyzing it in terms of grammar. Their lessons are based on a dialogue oriented
textbook, as opposed to one with many short reading passages. However, on closer
inspection, much of the speaking is in grammatically correct English, similar to theEnglish spoken by Yuko (Spack, 1997), perhaps more adequately described as “readingout loud” than speaking.
Tatsuya’s experience in the class highlights the difference between spoken andwritten English. The “mistakes” that Tatsuya often makes on exams are often due to hisWritten and Spoken English 11

use of his English abilities acquired overseas to solve problems, rather than apply what
the class covered for the exam. For example, Tatsuya will write “When will you visit
Taro?” instead of “What time will you visit Taro?” or “Right over here, please” insteadof “Right this way, please.” He answers as he would speak, instead of what the textbook
dialogue modeled. A common answer of Ms. Tanaka to Tatsuya’s asking why he wasmarked down is “that’s not how I taught the class.”
But are such “mistakes” really mistakes? If the objective of the class is to teachspeaking in the sense of contemporary spoken American English, then Tatsuya’s
answers are model answers, and should not be marked down. An extreme example oftesting what was learned in class rather than spoken English is question 7 on the 2ndsemester midterm exam. The question reads:
7. Pick the best answer to the following dialogues. You may use the sameanswer more than once. (The correct answer is in parentheses.)(1) May I use this computer? (C)(2) Must I finish it by tomorrow? (E)(3) Shall I close the window? (B)(4) Will you take a picture of us? (C)Choices:A. Yes, I must. B. Yes, please. C. Sure.
D. Yes, I am. E. No, you don’t have to. F. Yes, I do.
The only possible answer to (1) and (4) is C. However, in the case of (2) and (3), both B
and E seem equally appropriate. Looking again at the question with the “correct”
answers in mind, the biggest difference between (2) and (3) is the use of “Must I…” andWritten and Spoken English 12“Shall I…” forms. Looking at a grammar section in the textbook, it states that answers
to “Shall I…” should take forms such as “Yes, please. / No, thank you.” and responses
to “May I…” should take forms such as “Sure. / Sorry, you can’t.” With these rules inmind, the “correct” answers strictly adhere to these rules, although “such as” arguably
provides leeway for other answers.
As this exam question indicates, however, there is no leeway, and the class istaught in a one question, one response approach. Such an approach fails to notice thatwhile both writing and speaking are governed by grammar, writing is grammaticallyright or wrong, whereas speaking may be grammatically wrong, but still be “correct” inthe sense that it has become so commonplace that our ears do not catch the mistake. In
other words, written English is a subset of spoken English (Figure 1), and imposing
correct grammar onto spoken English fails to encompass the larger range covered byacceptable spoken English. For example, in spoken English, common equivalents of“Yes” include “OK,” “Yeah,” and “You bet,” but such expressions are not used informal writing. On the other hand, most writing can be spoken, although this often
results in unnecessarily stiff speaking.

Written and Spoken English 13

Spoken English

Written English(followes
grammar rules)

Figure 1: The general relationship of spoken and written English
I mentioned above that “our ears” often do not catch grammatical mistakes inspeaking, if the expression is frequently used. Native speakers and many returnees are
immersed in English, and through sources such as the media, peers, and instructors,
learn to distinguish between “correct” and “incorrect” speaking by ear. This is however,
not a simple process, even for children picking up an L1, and would be impractical in an
English class that has only three 50 minute periods per week, although instruction time
is not as important as quality of input (Dicker, 2003). To speed up language learning, agrammar based approach allows cognitively developed students to artificially acquire
this “ear” for English, in a far shorter time span, and this has been the traditional
Japanese approach to English, as mentioned by Yuko (Spack, 1997).
In other words, the grammar-based approach to speaking is not in itself aproblem. The problem with Ms. Tanaka’s class is that as in Tatsuya’s case, English

Written and Spoken English 14

speakers outside of the rigid one question, one response framework are forced toconform when such students could instead be utilized to demonstrate the flexibility of
spoken English. While it may not be practical to use returnee students to model spoken
English as they face a chance of being ostracized for standing out, ALT’s could model
different styles of speaking. ALT’s currently act as a “live” version of the CD includedin the textbook, but ALT’s could model the dialogue, and then elaborate, “But anotherway to say this is like this…” In this way, students would have the opportunity tounderstand that their textbook is not the only correct way to speak, and learn thatspoken English is more flexible than written English, just like Japanese, since most
students already understand the difference between spoken and written Japanese.
Indeed, for junior high school students, one problem may in fact be this lack offlexibility in English. At Nichiei Immersion School, Kanno (2008) noticed a reluctanceof older students, particularly teenagers, to speak in English, because adolescents need“slang and informal language” to “[signal] their identities…and ‘talk the right talk’” (ascited in Tarone and Swain, 1995, p.169). In other words, if students were given theopportunity to also learn some contemporary teenage language in class, they may be
more willing to use and learn English. After all, English is viewed as a fashionablelanguage in Japan, as can be seen from English and the alphabet playing a prominent

Written and Spoken English 15

role in brand names and advertising. While teachers may not know slang, ALT’s andreturnees could fill in this gap.
In conclusion, looking at Tatsuya’s treatment in the class, his strength in spoken
English is overlooked and ignored—a common experience of returnees (Kanno, 2000).
Yet Tatsuya is the goal of the 2003 MEXT policy: to pursue English education withmore emphasis on oral communication. The policy is supposedly a move away from
Yuko and the traditional grammar based approach (Spack, 1997). However, because thecurrent emphasis on oral communication still does not attempt to encompass the wider
range of spoken English over written English, Tatsuya’s experience is not of use to theactual implementation of the 2003 MEXT policy—a policy that does not realize thatperhaps Japanese people have a hard time speaking because their English is completely
inflexible, and not due to lack of opportunity to speak.

Written and Spoken English 16

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